Remembering Ivan: In September last year I was in New Orleans for a symposium on Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn when news broke that Hurricane Ivan was roaring in from the Gulf of Mexico and heading straight for the levees protecting the vulnerable city that lies beneath them.
Apart from the catastrophic outcome this time, the days that led up to Ivan were eerily reminiscent of those that preceded Katrina.
As Ivan bore down, Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and called for an evacuation. Just as now, the eloquent mayor became a regular feature on local television stations urging people to get out immediately.
As time wore on his appeals became increasingly urgent and dramatic until finally he intoned solemnly: "The window of opportunity has now closed."
At the time, I thought he was hamming it up.
However, just as with Katrina, more than a million people heeded the mayor's calls, jamming all the highways leading out of town, towards Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, where they could depend on relatives and friends and perhaps the kindness of strangers.
So why didn't everyone just get the hell out of town?
In the first place there were those who simply disagreed with the call to evacuate. A frustrated businessman told me Ray Nagin and his officials "were running around like headless chickens". Their hasty actions would lose the city countless millions of dollars. Meteorologists were making the most of the threat from Ivan "to hog the limelight".
But not everybody could leave, even if they wanted to, and tens of thousands stayed put, stocked up and battened down to wait it out. Any call to evacuate assumed car ownership or at least having the cash to buy a plane ticket or bus ticket, if you could find a bus.
For older people, the sick and tens of thousands in poorer districts, that window of opportunity had always been closed.
Others stayed simply to be with their pets - something the US president would understand since he walked down the steps of Air Force One in Washington late last week to deal with the crisis carrying a sombre demeanour and Barney, his immaculately coiffed mutt.
Among the others who stayed were the drifters, the vagrants and the unhinged.
I met some of these on the night Ivan was supposed to hit, hanging around the waterfront on the levee across Decatur Street from Jackson Square in the French Quarter. It was darkening and the winds were whipping up.
One awkward, shy teenager with an endearing southern drawl asked me for a cigarette. He said his name was "Playboy" and that he was staying out all night to savour the experience of Ivan.
He stared out over the swollen Mississippi river as it heaved beneath dark billowing clouds rumbling in on the powerful early winds of Ivan, then he turned to look up at me and said earnestly: "This is my first."
Over a three-day period the town had been emptying fast and the usually heaving quarter turned into a ghost town, save for a few hot-dog vendors, some stranded tourists and the odd reporter desperately seeking quotes.
A notice outside one bar boasted: "We don't run from Hurricanes, we drink 'em," referring to the Hurricane cocktails on sale everywhere in the quarter.
One of the few shops that remained open for Ivan was having a "hurricane sale", but there were few takers.
I recall, too, wooden shuttering nailed over apartment windows on which slogans were written naming all the previous hurricanes the occupants, and New Orleans, had survived. The middle-aged residents proudly posed for photojournalists beside their taunts to Ivan.
Even before the curfew kicked in I had become sure Mayor Nagin was not showboating. In the early morning I bought enough water and provisions to last a couple of days. If the worst came, I though I'd be safe enough on the first floor of my lodgings on Ursuline Avenue, above the exquisite Croissant d'Or patisserie whose French chef Maurice had stayed put with his poodle.
When the first storms hit I took sanctuary in Molly's Irish bar on the waterfront where there was more defiance and bravado. "This is the party town, we're having a hurricane party," youngsters told me to a toast of "Happy hurricane". Last year they had luck as well as youth on their side.
As the night wore on the news came that the epicentre of Ivan had shifted and we were to be spared the worst. "It's almost as if the hand of God is protecting the parish of New Orleans," a relieved city official said.
On the streets the following morning you could almost touch that great sense of relief.
On the waterfront by the levee above Jackson Square, an elderly black saxophone player was busking. Clarence Bowie, "pronounced Booie, like Jim Booie", stayed because he had no place to go and no way of going.
I asked him to play Stranger on the Shore and as the haunting melody wafted out over a gently lapping Mississippi, it felt that the special magic of New Orleans had survived.
As I walked away, Clarence kindly struck up Danny Boy for an Irish stranger. At that moment, I think I fell in love with "Nawlins". I celebrated later with coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde near the French Market.
So it was with great sadness that over the past week as I watched the scenes of apocalyptic horror unfold on television. I thought of all those who remained behind this time, of those who couldn't or wouldn't leave, of the hot-dog vendors I had spoken with, the vagrants and drifters like Playboy, busker Clarence Bowie, Maurice and his poodle.
And yet at first it seemed that Katrina, too, would go the way of Ivan. But she fooled everyone this time, and the levee broke. Slowly it dawned that Lake Pontchartrain would swamp most of the Big Easy.
When Lafcadio Hearn lived in New Orleans in the 1870s and 1880s, he wrote a strangely beautiful and prescient novel, Chita, A Memory of Last Island, which centred on the last hurricane to have caused such death and devastation to the coast of Louisiana.
That was all of 150 years before Katrina and unconscionable negligence altered our image of old New Orleans.
